Common sense starts out with the assumption that what we know directly is such things as trees, grass, anger, hope and so on, and that these things have qualities such as solidity, greenness, unpleasantness and so on, which are also facts directly known. It is not very difficult to show that, if we examine the facts which we know directly, we cannot find in them any such things as trees, grass, or minds, over and above the various qualities which we say belong to them. I see one colour and you see another: both of them are colours belonging to the grass but neither of us can find anything among the facts known to him corresponding to this grass, regarded as something over and above its various qualities, to which those qualities are supposed to belong.

This drives common sense back unto its second line of defence where it takes up the much stronger position of asserting that, while trees, grass, minds, etc., are not among the facts directly known, their qualities of solidity, greenness, etc., are. It is usual to add that these qualities are signs of real trees, grass, etc., which exist independently but are only known to us through their qualities.

It is much harder to attack this position, but its weakness is best exposed by considering change as we know it directly, and comparing this with change as represented in terms of qualities. Change, when represented in terms of qualities, forms a series in which different qualities are strung together one after the other by the aid of temporal relations of before and after. The change perceived when we look at the spectrum would thus have to be described in terms of a series of colours, red before orange, orange before yellow, yellow before green, and so on. We might certainly go into greater detail than this, distinguishing any number of shades in each of the colours mentioned, but the description would still have to be given in the same form, that of a series of different colours, or shades of colour, strung together by relations of before and after. Now the fact which we know directly does not change so: it forms a continuous becoming which is not made up of any number, however great, of fixed stages. When we want to represent this changing fact in terms of qualities we have to put together a series of qualities, such as red, orange, etc., and then say that “the colour” changes from one of these to another. We pretend that there is “a colour” which is not itself either red or green or orange or blue, which changes into all these different colours one after another. It is not very difficult to see that this abstract colour which is neither red nor orange nor green nor blue is not a fact but only an abstraction which is convenient for purposes of description: it is not quite so easy to see that this criticism applies equally to each of the separate colours, red, orange, etc., and yet a little attention shows that these also are really nothing but abstractions. With reference to the whole changing fact which is known directly through any period the change in respect of colour is clearly an abstraction. But just as there is no “colour” over and above the red, the orange, the green, etc., which we say we see, so there is really no “red,” “orange,” “green,” over and above the changing process with which we are directly acquainted. Each of these, the red, the orange, and so on, just like the abstract “colour,” is simply a fictitious stage in the process of changing which it is convenient to abstract when we want to describe the process but which does not itself occur as a distinct part in the actual fact.

Change, as we know it directly, does not go on between fixed points such as these stages which we abstract, it goes on impartially, as it were, through the supposed stages just as much as in between them. But though fixed stages are not needed to enable change to occur, simply as a fact, they are needed if we are to describe change and explain it in terms of general laws. Qualities are assumptions required, not in order that change may take place, but in order that we may describe, explain, and so control it. Such particular qualities as red and green are really no more facts directly known than such still more general, and so more obviously fictitious notions as a colour which is of no particular shade, or a table, or a mind, apart from its qualities or states. All these fixed things are alike abstractions required for explaining facts directly known but not occurring as actual parts of those facts or stages in their change.

Thus it appears that the common sense world of things and qualities and events is in the same position, with regard to the actual facts directly known as scientific hypotheses such as forces, electrons, and so on, in their various relations: none of these actually form parts of the fact, all of them are abstractions from the fact itself which are useful for explaining and so controlling it. Common sense stops short at things and qualities and events; science carries the abstraction further, that is all the difference: the aim in both cases is the same, the practical one of explaining and so controlling facts directly known. In both cases the method employed is the intellectual method of abstraction which begins by discriminating within the whole field directly known in favour of just so much as will enable us to classify it and ignoring the rest, and then proceeds to confuse even this selected amount of the actual fact with the abstract classes or other symbols in terms of which it is explained. We have just seen how the result, the worlds of common sense or science, differ from the actual facts in the way in which they change: these worlds of abstractions represent change as a series of fixed stages united by temporal relations, while the actual fact forms a continuous process of becoming which does not contain any such fixed points, as stages in relations.

The more we shake ourselves free from the common sense and scientific bias towards substituting explanations for actual facts the more clearly we see that this continuous process of changing is the very essence of what we know directly, and the more we realize how unlike such a continuous process is to any series of stages in relation of succession.

The unsatisfactoriness of such descriptions is no new discovery: the logical difficulties connected with the attempt to describe change in terms of series of successive things or events have been familiar since the time when Zeno invented the famous dilemma of Achilles’ race with the tortoise. Mathematicians have been in the habit of telling us that these difficulties depend simply on the fact that we imagine the series of positions at which Achilles and the tortoise find themselves from moment to moment as finite: the device of the infinite series, they say, satisfies all the requirements needed for representing change and solves all the logical difficulties which arise from it. Bergson’s difficulties, however, cannot be solved in this way for they are not based upon the discovery of logical absurdities but upon the discrepancy between the description and the fact. What he maintains is that the description of change in terms of an infinite series of stages leaves out the change altogether. Zeno’s logical dilemma as to how Achilles could ever catch up with the tortoise provided the tortoise was given a start, however small, may be countered by the ingenuity of the mathematicians’ infinite series. Bergson’s difficulty turns on a question of fact, not of logic, and cannot be so met. He solves the problem simply by denying that Achilles or the tortoise ever are at particular points at particular moments. Such a description of change, he says, leaves out the real changing. And the introduction of the notion of an infinite series only makes the matter worse. For stages do not change, and so, if there is to be any change, it must, presumably, take place in between one stage and the next. But in between any two stages of an infinite series there are supposed to be an infinite number of other stages, so that to any given stage there is no next stage. Change, therefore, cannot take place between one stage and the next one, there being no next one, and since it is equally impossible that it should take place at any one of the stages themselves it follows that an infinite series of stages leaves out change altogether. Similarly a series of instants before and after one another leaves out of time just the element of passage, becoming, which is its essence.

The truth, Bergson says, is that with fixed stages, no matter how many you take, and no matter in what relation you arrange them, you cannot reproduce the change and time which actually occur as facts directly known. If Achilles or the tortoise are ever at different places at different moments then neither of them really moves at all. Change and time, as represented by abstractions, according to the intellectual method, consist of stages in relations of succession, but the fact does not happen by stages and is not held together by relations: if we compare the representation with the fact we find that they differ profoundly in their form.

According to Bergson this difference in form is one of the two essential respects in which abstractions fail to represent facts and in which, consequently, we are led into error as to the facts if we fail to distinguish them from the abstractions in terms of which we explain them, or take for granted that they correspond exactly with our explanations.

Bergson gives the name “space” to the form which belongs to abstractions but not to actual facts: abstractions, he says, are “spatial,” but facts are not. This use of the word “space” is peculiar and perhaps unfortunate. Even as it is ordinarily used the word “space” is ambiguous, it may mean either the pure space with which higher mathematics is concerned, or the public space which contains the common sense things and objects and their qualities which make up the every day world, or the private space of sensible perception. When Bergson speaks of “space,” however, he does not mean either pure or public or private space, he means an a priori form imposed by intellectual activity upon its object. This resembles Kant’s use of the word, but Bergson’s “space” is not, like Kant’s, the a priori form of sense acquaintance, but of thought, in other words logical form. For Bergson “spatial” means “logical,” and since so much misunderstanding seems to have been caused by his using the word “space” in this peculiar sense we shall perhaps do better in what follows to use the word “logical” instead.

Now whatever is logical is characterised by consisting of distinct, mutually exclusive terms in external relations: all schemes, for instance, and diagrams, such as a series of dots one above the other, or one below the other, or one behind, or in front of the other, or a series of instants one after the other, or a series of numbers, or again any arrangements of things or qualities according to their relations, such as colours or sounds arranged according to their resemblance or difference; in all these each dot or instant or number or colour-shade or note, is quite distinct from all the others, and the relations which join it to the others and give it its position in the whole series are external to it in the sense that if you changed its position or included it in quite another series it would nevertheless still be just the same dot or instant or number or quality as before.

These two logical characteristics of mutual distinction of terms and externality of relations certainly do belong to the abstractions employed in explanations, and we commonly suppose that they belong to everything else besides. Bergson, however, believes that these logical characteristics really only belong to abstractions and are not discovered in facts but are imposed upon them by our intellectual bias, in the sense that we take it for granted that the facts which we know directly must have the same form as the abstractions which serve to explain them.

This habit of taking it for granted that not only our abstractions but also the actual facts have the logical characteristics of consisting of mutually exclusive terms joined by external relations is, according to Bergson, one of the two serious respects in which our intellectual bias distorts our direct acquaintance with actual fact. He points out, as we saw, that the facts with which we are acquainted are in constant process of changing, and that, when we examine carefully what is actually going on, we discover that this change does not really form a series of distinct qualities or percepts or states, united by external relations of time, resemblance, difference, and so on, but a continuous process which has what we might call a qualitative flavour but in which distinct qualities, states and so on do not occur.

“Considered in themselves” he says, “profound states of consciousness have no relation to quantity: they are mingled in such a way that it is impossible to say whether they are one or many, or indeed to examine them from that point of view without distorting them.” Now, strictly speaking, of course, these “states of consciousness” ought not to be referred to in the plural, it is, in fact, a contradiction to speak of “states of consciousness” having “no relation to quantity”: a plurality must always form some quantity. This contradiction is the natural consequence of attempting to put what is non-logical into words. It would have been just as bad to have referred to “the state of consciousness,” in the singular, while at the same time insisting that it contained resemblance and difference. The fact is that plurality and unity, like distinct terms and external relations, apply only to whatever has logical form, and Bergson’s whole point is to deny that the fact (or facts) directly known have this form, and so that any of these notions apply to it (or them.)

This, of course, raises difficulties when we try to describe the facts in words, since words stand for abstractions and carry their logical implications. All descriptions in words of what is non-logical are bound to be a mass of contradictions, for, having applied any word it is necessary immediately to guard against its logical implications by adding another which contradicts them. Thus we say our experience is of facts, and must then hastily add that nevertheless they are not plural, and we must further qualify this statement by adding that neither are they singular. A description of what is non-logical can only convey its meaning if we discount all the logical implications of the words which, for want of a better medium of expression, we are driven to employ. Our whole intellectual bias urges us towards describing everything that comes within our experience, even if the description is only for our own private benefit Unfortunately the language in which these descriptions have to be expressed is so full of logical implications that, unless we are constantly on our guard, we are liable to be carried away by them, and then, at once, we lose contact with the actual facts.

In order to get round this almost universal tendency to confuse abstractions with facts Bergson sometimes tries to get us to see the facts as they actually are by using metaphor instead of description in terms of abstract general notions. He has been much criticised for this but there is really a good deal to be said for attempting to convey facts by substituting metaphors for them rather than by using the ordinary intellectual method of substituting abstractions reached by analysis. Those who have criticised the use of metaphor have for the most part not realized how little removed such description is from the ordinary intellectual method of analysis. They have supposed that in analysis we stick to the fact itself, whereas in using metaphor we substitute for the fact to be described some quite different fact which is only connected with it by a more or less remote analogy. If Bergson’s view of the intellectual method is right, however, when we describe in abstract terms arrived at by analysis we are not sticking to the facts at all, we are substituting something else for them just as much as if we were using an out and out metaphor. Qualities and all abstract general notions are, indeed, nothing but marks of analogies between a given fact and all the other facts belonging to the same class: they may mark rather closer analogies than those brought out by an ordinary metaphor, but on the other hand in a frank metaphor we at least stick to the concrete, we substitute fact for fact and we are in no danger of confusing the fact introduced by the metaphor with the actual fact to which the metaphor applies. In description in terms of abstract general notions such as common qualities we substitute for fact something which is not fact at all, we lose touch with the concrete and, moreover, we are strongly tempted to confuse fact with abstraction and believe that the implications of the abstraction apply to the fact, or even that the abstraction is itself a real part of the fact.

Language plays a most important part in forming our habit of treating all facts as material for generalisation, and it is largely to the influence of the words which we use for describing facts that Bergson attributes our readiness to take it for granted that facts have the same logical form as abstractions. It is language again which makes it so difficult to point out that this assumption is mistaken, because, actually, the form of facts is non-logical, a continuous process and not a series. The only way to point this out is by describing the nature of the non-logical facts as contrasted with a logical series, but the language in which our description of the non-logical facts has to be conveyed is itself full of logical implications which contradict the very point we are trying to bring out. Descriptions of non-logical processes will only be intelligible if we discount the logical implications inherent in the words employed, but in order to be willing to discount these implications it is necessary first to be convinced that there is anything non-logical to which such a description could apply. And yet how can we be convinced without first understanding the description? It appears to be a vicious circle, and so it would be if our knowledge of change as a process really depended upon our understanding anybody’s description of it. According to Bergson, however, we all do know such a process directly; in fact, if he is right, we know nothing else directly at all. The use of description is not to give us knowledge of the process, that we already have, but only to remind us of what we really knew all along, but had rather lost contact with and misinterpreted because of our preoccupation with describing and explaining it. Bergson’s criticism of our intellectual methods turns simply upon a question of fact, to be settled by direct introspection. If, when we have freed ourselves from the preconceptions created by our normal common sense intellectual point of view, we find that what we know directly is a non-logical process of becoming, then we must admit that intellectual thinking is altogether inappropriate and even mischievous as a method of speculation.

It is one of Bergson’s chief aims to induce us to regain contact with our direct experience, and it is with this in view that he spends so much effort in describing what the form of this experience actually is, and how it compares with the logical form which belongs to abstractions, that is with what he calls “space.”

The form which belongs to facts but not to abstractions Bergson calls “duration.” Duration can be described negatively by saying that it is non-logical, but when we attempt any positive description language simply breaks down and we can do nothing but contradict ourselves. Duration does not contain parts united by external relations: it does not contain parts at all, for parts would constitute fixed stages, whereas duration changes continuously.

But in order to describe duration at all we have logically only two alternatives, either to speak of it as a plurality, and that implies having parts, or else as a unity, and that by implication, excludes change. Being particularly concerned to emphasise the changing nature of what we know directly Bergson rejects the latter alternative: short of simply giving up the attempt to describe it he has then no choice but to treat this process which he calls duration as a plurality and this drives him into speaking of it as if it had parts. To correct this false impression he adds that these parts are united, not, like logical parts, by external relations, but in quite a new way, by “synthesis.” “Parts” united by synthesis have not the logical characteristics of mutual distinction and externality of relations, they interpenetrate and modify one another. In a series which has duration (such a thing is a contradiction in terms, but the fault lies with the logical form of language which, in spite of its unsatisfactoriness we are driven to employ if we want to describe at all) the “later parts” are not distinct from the “earlier”: “earlier and” “later” are not mutually exclusive relations.

Bergson says, then, that the process of duration which we know directly, if it is to be called a series at all, must be described as a series whose “parts” interpenetrate, and this is the first important respect in which non-logical duration differs from a logical series. In “a series” which is used to describe duration not only are the “parts” not distinct but “their relations” are not external in the sense, previously explained, in which logical relations are external to the terms which they relate. A logical term in a logical series can change its position or enter into a wholly different series and still remain the same term. But the terms in a series which has duration (again this is absurd) are what they are just because of their position in the whole stream of duration to which they belong: to transfer them from one position in the series to another would be to alter their whole flavour which depends upon having had just that particular past and no other. As illustration we might take the last bar of a tune. By itself, or following upon other sounds not belonging to the tune, this last bar would not be itself, its particular quality depends upon coming at the end of that particular tune. In a process of duration, then, such as tune, the “later” bars are not related externally to the “earlier” but depend for their character upon their position in the whole tune. In actual fact, of course, the tune progresses continuously, and not by stages, such as distinct notes or bars, but if, for the sake of description, we speak of it as composed of different bars, we must say that any bar we choose to distinguish is modified by the whole of the tune which has gone before it: change its position in the whole stream of sound to which it belongs and you change its character absolutely.

This means that in change such as this, change, that is, which has duration, repetition is out of the question. Take a song in which the last line is sung twice over as a refrain: the notes, we say, are repeated, but the second time the line occurs the actual effect produced is different, and that, indeed, is the whole point of a refrain. This illustrates the second important difference which Bergson wants to bring out between the forms of change which belong respectively to non-logical facts and to the logical abstractions by which we describe them, that is between duration as contrasted with a logical series of stages. The notes are abstractions assumed to explain the effect produced, which is the actual fact directly known. The notes are stages in a logical series of change, but their effects, the actual fact, changes as a process of duration. From this difference in their ways of changing there follows an important difference between fact and abstraction, namely that, while the notes can be repeated over again, the effect will never be the same as before. This is because the notes, being abstractions, are not affected by their relations which give them their position in the logical series which they form, while their effect, being a changing process, depends for its flavour upon its position in the whole duration to which it belongs: this flavour grows out of the whole of what has gone before, and since this whole is itself always growing by the addition of more and more “later stages,” the effect which it goes to produce can never be the same twice over.

This is why Bergson calls duration “creative.”

No “two” positions in a creative process of duration can have an identical past history, every “later” one will have more history, every “earlier” one less. In a logical series, on the other hand, there is no reason why the same term should not occur over and over again at different points in the course of the series, since in a logical series every term, being distinct from every other and only joined to it by external relations, is what it is independently of its position.

If Bergson is right therefore in saying that abstractions change as a logical series while the actual facts change as a creative process of duration, it follows that, while our descriptions and explanations may contain repetitions the actual fact to which we intend these explanations to apply, cannot. This, if true, is a very important difference between facts and abstractions which common sense entirely overlooks when it assumes that we are directly acquainted with common qualities.

We have seen that this assumption is taken for granted in the account which is ordinarily given (or would be given if people were in the habit of putting their common sense assumptions into words) of how it is that facts come to be classified: facts are supposed to fall into classes because they share common qualities, that is because, in the changing fact directly known, the same qualities recur over and over again. There is no doubt that the fact with which we are directly acquainted can be classified, and it is equally undeniable that this fact is always changing, but if this change has the form of creative duration then its classification cannot be based upon the repetition of qualities at different “stages” in its course. It follows that either the fact with which we are directly acquainted does not change as a creative process, or else that we are quite wrong in assuming, as we ordinarily do, that we actually know qualities directly and that it is these qualities which form the basis of classification, and hence of all description and explanation. We have already seen that this assumption, though at first sight one naturally supposes it to be based on direct acquaintance, may really depend not on any fact directly known but on our preoccupation with explanation rather than with mere knowing.

But if we never really are acquainted with qualities, if qualities are, as Bergson says, mere abstractions, how come we to be able to make these abstractions, and why do they apply to actual facts? If classification is not based on common qualities discovered by analysis and repeated over and over as actual facts directly known, on what is it based? We certainly can classify facts and these abstract common qualities, if abstractions they be, certainly correspond to something in the facts since they apply to them: what is the foundation in directly knowu fact which accounts for this correspondence between abstractions and facts if it is not qualities actually given as part of the facts? These questions are so very pertinent and at the same time so difficult to answer satisfactorily that one is tempted to throw over the view that the changing fact which we know directly forms a creative duration. This view is impossible to express without self-contradiction and it does not fit in with our accustomed habits of mind: nevertheless if we do not simply reject it at once as patently absurd but keep it in mind for a while and allow ourselves time to get used to it, it grows steadily more and more convincing: we become less and less able to evade these difficult questions by accepting the common sense account of what we know directly as consisting of a series of qualities which are repeated over and over, and more and more driven to regard it as a process in creative duration which does not admit of repetitions. There is no difficulty in seeing, the moment we pay attention, that what we know directly certainly does change all the time: but if we try to pin this change down and hold it so as to examine it we find it slipping through our fingers, and the more we look into the supposed stages, such as things and qualities and events, by means of which common sense assumes that this change takes place, the more it becomes apparent that these stages are all of them mere arbitrary abstractions dragged from their context in a continuous process, fictitious halting places in a stream of change which goes on unbroken. Unbiassed attention to the actual fact cannot fail to convince us that what we know directly changes as a process and not by a series of stages.

The creativeness of this process is perhaps at first not quite so obvious, but if we look into the fact once more, with the object of observing repetitions in it, we realize that we cannot find any. It is true that you can pick out qualities which at first appear to recur: you may, for example, see a rose and then a strawberry ice cream, and you may be inclined to say that here you saw the quality pink twice over. But you can only say that what you saw was the same both times by abstracting what we call the colour from the whole context in which it actually appeared on the two different occasions. In reality the colour is not known in isolation: it has its place, in the whole changing fact in a particular context which you may describe in abstract terms as consisting of the shape and smell and size of the object together with all the rest of your state of mind at the moment, which were not the same on the two different occasions, while further this pink colour was modified on each occasion by its position in the whole changing fact which may again be described in abstract terms by saying, for instance, that the pink on the occasion of your seeing the strawberry ice cream, coming after the pink on the occasion of your seeing the rose, had a peculiar flavour of “seen before” which was absent on the previous occasion. Thus although, by isolating “parts” of the whole process of changing which you know directly, you may bring yourself for a moment to suppose that you are acquainted with repetitions, when you look at the whole fact as it actually is, you see that what you know is never the same twice over, and that your direct experience forms, not a series of repetitions, but a creative process.

But, once you grant that the fact which you know directly really changes, there is, according to Bergson, no getting away from the conclusion that it must form a creative process of duration. For he thinks that creative duration is the only possible way in which the transition between past and present, which is the essential feature of change and time, could be accomplished: all passing from past to present, all change, therefore, and all time, must, he says, form a creative process of duration. The alternative is to suppose that time and change form logical series of events in temporal relations of before and after, but, according to Bergson, this not only leaves out the transition altogether but is, even as it stands, unintelligible. The argument is this.

If time and change are real, then, when the present is, the past simply is not. But it is impossible to see how, in that case, there can be any relation between past and present, for a relation requires at least two terms in between which it holds, while in this case there could never be more than one term, the present, ipso facto, abolishing the past. If, on the other hand, the past is preserved, distinct from the present, then temporal relations can indeed hold between them, but in that case there is no real change nor time at all.

This dilemma all follows, of course, from regarding “past” and “present” as mutually exclusive and distinct, and requiring to be united by external relations, in short as terms in a logical series: for Bergson himself this difficulty simply does not arise since he denies that, within the actual changing fact directly known, there are any clear cut logical distinctions such as the words “past” and “present” imply. But when it comes to describing this changing fact distinct terms have to be employed because there are no others, and this creates pseudo-problems such as this question of how, assuming past and present to be distinct, the transition between them ever can be effected. The real answer is that the transition never is effected because past and present are, in fact, not distinct.

According to Bergson a very large proportion of the problems over which philosophers have been accustomed to dispute have really been pseudo-problems simply arising out of this confusion between facts and the abstractions by which we describe them. When once we have realized how they arise these pseudo-problems no longer present any difficulties; they are in fact no longer problems at all, they melt away and cease to interest us. If Bergson is right this would go far to explain the suspicion which, in spite of the prestige of philosophy, still half unconsciously colours the feeling of the “plain man” for the “intellectual,” and which even haunts the philosopher himself, in moments of discouragement, the suspicion that the whole thing is trivial, a dispute about words of no real importance or dignity. If Bergson is right this suspicion is, in many cases, all too well founded: the discussion of pseudo-problems is not worth while. But then the discussion of pseudo-problems is not real philosophy: the thinker who allows himself to be entangled in pseudo-problems has lost his way.

In this, however, the “intellectuals” are not the only ones at fault. “Plain men” are misled by abstractions about facts just as much, only being less thorough, their mistake has less effect: at the expense of a little logical looseness their natural sense of fact saves them from all the absurdities which follow from their false assumptions. For the “intellectual” there is not this loophole through which the sense of fact may undo some of the work of false assumptions: the “intellectual” follows out ruthlessly the implications of his original assumptions and if these are false his very virtues lead him into greater absurdities than those committed by “plain men.”

One of the most important tasks of philosophy is to show up the pseudo-problems so that they may no longer waste our time and we may be free to pursue the real aim of philosophy which is the reconquest of the field of virtual knowledge. Getting rid of the pseudo-problems, however, is no easy task: we may realize, for example, that the difficulty of seeing how the transition between past and present ever can be effected is a pseudo-problem because in fact past and present are not distinct and so no transition between them is needed. But since we have constantly to be using words which carry the implication of distinctness we are constantly liable to forget this simple answer when new problems, though in fact they all spring from this fundamental discrepancy between facts and the abstractions by which we describe them, present themselves in some slightly different form.

The notion of duration as consisting of “parts” united by “creative synthesis” is a device, not for explaining how the transition from past to present really takes place (this does not need explaining since, “past” and “present” being mere abstractions, no transition between them actually takes place at all), but for enabling us to employ the abstractions “past” and “present” without constantly being taken in by their logical implications. The notion of “creative synthesis” as what joins “past” and “present” in a process of duration is an antidote to the logical implications of these two distinct terms: creative synthesis, unlike logical relations, is not external to the “parts” which it joins; “parts” united by creative synthesis are not distinct and mutually exclusive. Such a notion as this of creative synthesis contradicts the logical implications contained in the notion of parts. The notion of “parts” united by “creative synthesis” is really a hybrid which attempts to combine the two incompatible notions of logical distinction and duration. The result is self-contradictory and this contradiction acts as a reminder warning us against confusing the actual changing fact with the abstractions in terms of which we describe it and so falling into the mistake of taking it for granted that this changing fact must form a series of distinct stages or things or events or qualities, which can be repeated over and over again.

At the same time there is no getting away from the fact that this changing fact lends itself to classification and that explanations in terms of abstractions really do apply to it most successfully. We are therefore faced with the necessity of finding some way of accounting for this, other than by assuming that the facts which we know directly consist of qualities which recur over and over again.